40VIDEO Assessing Your Footstool & Fixing a Wobble

In this video I want to talk to you about the stool. We've got a completed stool here. It's a serviceable stool

It's gonna lift your feet up at the end of the day and make you feel better however

It doesn't really look like furniture, does it? It kind of looks sort of like a shipping crate or a pallet or something like that

And that's because this doesn't have any refinement added to it yet

now in this case because we're building this footstool in the most basic and simple way I

Didn't do the sanding and refinements and things that I would normally do during construction. I wouldn't have put this stool together

With the wood in this condition. So what we're gonna do later is take this all apart and refine it

But before we do that, I just want to point out why this doesn't look like furniture

And I mean the first reason is because the woods kind of rough and you can see it here. We've got

We've got planar marks You can you can see them the lines here that's because

This surface was formed by a series of scallops a series of curved moves

from a planar thickness planar that turned it from rough lumber to

Smooth lumber or planed lumber it's called, but it's still not all that smooth at least not for furniture use

So we got we got that We've got some tearing of the wood here

The grain was running in one direction and the thickness planar was running in the other so it caused that tearing

It's dirty some of the corners are Dented a little bit. This is all completely normal, by the way

We didn't do any mistakes and if your footstool looks like this you didn't do any mistakes either. This is just the way

Lumber looks until you refine it. Another issue here is the The saw and edge this is about as smooth as you can get a saw and edge with a handsaw

But it's still not nearly smooth enough for interior furniture use Also, we've got the the factory edge here very slightly rounded and then the edge here quite crisp

So that's no good. You have pencil lines All of these things I'm going to show you how to refine how to refine away and then you can decide for yourself how

Fancy and smooth and refined you want your stool to be there is

I would call it a semi structural problem that your footstool almost certainly has mine does and it's it's a wobble

so Refinement involves dealing with the surfaces, but before we get that far

we got to fix the wobble because nobody wants a wobbly footstool and

We're going to do that using a process called scribing I've done my best in this course to create a project and to put it together in such a way that

You'd be exposed to techniques and challenges and approaches and ways of thinking

That will apply to all kinds of woodworking and scribing is a very powerful technique that you can use in all kinds of situations

so Now I need to go over to a truly flat surface

so we can make sure that we're getting rid of the wobble in the stool and we're not compensating for any kind of a

Twisted floor so you'll have to find what you believe to be a flat surface

That could be I don't know kitchen counter. It could be a floor if it's if it's flat

Could be different things but right now I'm going to go over to my table saw which is the flattest

Handiest surface I have in my workshop right now, and we're going to do the scribing over there

so sure enough, I've put the stool on a very flat surface my table saw and

We've still got a wobble It's extremely likely count yourself very fortunate if your footstool doesn't have a wobble when you first put it together

Because this is the slightest difference in angle from one leg to the other That's going to make a wobble

So the first step to scribing that wobble away is to stabilize

The footstool so it doesn't rock and we need to use some sort of a wedge. These are plastic wedges

Meant for building and cabinet installation and things like that Anything will do you can you just jam cardboard under there or you know, if you've got a wooden wedge you can use that

but essentially what we want to do is we want to put the wedges in so that

Half the error is here on this side and then half is over on the other side

Because this is the high side here on one side and this is the high side over here when there's a wobble

It's always diagonal if you had Sort of this was a high side and that was a high side. Well, you wouldn't have a wobble necessarily that

The footstool would just tip over a little bit and it would be stable. So wobble always indicates

Some kind of a problem in opposite corners and so we'll Put a wedge in here

Kind of split the difference And put the wedge in there now, we're

Solid as a rock With the wedges in place. That's step one

This is where the actual scribing comes in. I'm just using a regular pencil and if you'll notice

When I put the pencil down on anything The tip is raised a little bit. Now, what is that? That's probably 3 16ths of an inch or so and

That's key because what I can do now is I can put this pencil

down here And I can simply trace Now did you notice something there

The pencil line Shows more wood over here at this end Right here than it does over here. In fact, there's almost no wood below the pencil line

here If I can remove wood from this leg Right up accurately right up to the pencil line and not beyond

And I can do the same thing on the other side because I'm going to scribe it if I can remove the wood right to

those lines I Will have a stable footstool I will have a stable footstool and

So I'm just going to go around and do all of the sides now

I Can't do it here because the wedge is here, but I can kind of

Rotate it out of the way Not that I really need to mark it here necessarily

The mark on the side is the most important one because that's that's what I'm going to be removing wood to

So, how do you suppose How do you suppose I'm going to remove

The wood I need to See more wood here less wood here

Not a whole lot on this side, but quite a bit more on that side

If I can bring it bring the wood of both legs down to that pencil line

Precisely. I'm gonna have a solid stool This isn't a whole lot of wood. So I can't saw it. I can't use the handsaw. I

Might be able to use a power saw but that's tricky and it can be dangerous

What I'm going to use is my edge sander Which is a nice big very very handy stationary machine that you certainly won't have yet. You might get one

Sooner or later. There are smaller versions and the one I'm going to be showing you But you don't have that you don't even have a small one. So how do you deal with that? Well, I'll just show you

This is the the handsaw method we'll call it Instead of just relying on the natural distance between one of the flats on this pencil and the tip of the lead

So that three sixteenths of an inch or whatever That the tip is raised above the wood instead of relying just on that

I'm going to park the pencil on a piece of wood That were raised as the pencil

and now when I scribe See here now when I scribe my scribe line is going to be much higher

It's going to be much higher. Actually, you know, I just grabbed this scrap

I could have probably gotten a little bit thinner scrap. I don't really need to go this much higher

but the idea The idea is that instead of by removing just the minimum amount of wood which is what I scribed to before I'm now

Making a mark that's sufficiently high that I could cut this with a handsaw

The problem is I can't cut that with a handsaw because there's not there won't be wood on both sides of the blade

To guide it. So the blade is simply just going to wander away from that that line if I tried to saw it

but here it's different I can saw to that line and There's going to be wood on both sides of the cut and the saw blade will be contained and it will work well

so that's the way you can do it, even if all you have is a Handsaw

But now let's go over to the edge sander. I'm going to show you how I do this

And then we'll bring the stool back and see how we did So

Let's see how we've done Rock solid and no wedges Scribing works amazingly well, and if if you've done

Scribing like this or have you ever do it in your career? and you scribe once and you you get get the wood down to the line and

Then you try it out. There's still a little bit of wobble. No problem. Just scribe again

And it just means you didn't get the lines quite right or maybe you remove too much wood on one side

easily fixed and We got a rock solid stool. That's now Worth refining because there's no point in putting a furniture grade finish on something that's going to wobble

Now let's just say that you happen to own a belt sander. A belt sander is a handheld

Sanding power tool. It's one of my recommended tools if you're building up your collection and

You can use a handheld belt sander to do the same job that I just did with my stationary edge sander

And and that just involves Clamping clamping the stool To a solid surface so that it doesn't move around and then holding the belt sander

below your eye level Moving it back and forth and working back to the line that way. It's a freehand operation

So it's a little bit more skill dependent than what I showed you on the stationary edge sander

But it works really well, and it will also offer the benefit of smoothing the bottom of the legs, too

So just one more little tip before I go and as I said this might not apply to you immediately

But chances are pretty good that you'll get a belt sander eventually. That's what this thing is here and

Yeah, and you of course you want to Spend as little as possible on abrasive belts

This is a replaceable belt and you flip a lever Take it off put on another one these belts come in different grit ratings

Just like sheet sandpaper does but the thing that stops them from working most often is that the pores

So the the spaces the valleys between the abrasive particles get clogged

With sawdust this one isn't too bad But when you're working with softwood it can get really bad

because the sawdust mixes with the resins and forms a kind of a

hard impervious layer so that the sanding belt and its abrasives could still be good, but

It can't really sand because the spaces are all plugged up The solution to that is is this thing

This is what's called crepe rubber Crepe it's a French word. I don't know why they call it that but it's a soft

rubber and Think of it as an eraser. It's kind of like a big eraser except the rate instead of erasing pencil marks it erases

Sawdust and resin from belts so you just kind of turn it on

I'll tell you first I'll turn it on and then hold this against the spinning belt and you're gonna you're gonna be amazed

I think at how clean this gets let me show you I

Look at that almost as good as new you can triple Quadruple maybe even more the life of a belt with a block like this and this block even with heavy use

In a woodworking shop almost every day. It's gonna last for years. So just something to keep in mind for the future